Proposition - Objections To Propositions

Objections To Propositions

Attempts to provide a workable definition of proposition include

Two meaningful declarative sentences express the same proposition if and only if they mean the same thing.

thus defining proposition in terms of synonymity. For example, "Snow is white" (in English) and "Schnee ist weiß" (in German) are different sentences, but they say the same thing, so they express the same proposition.

Two meaningful declarative sentence-tokens express the same proposition if and only if they mean the same thing.

Unfortunately, the above definition has the result that two sentences/sentence-tokens which have the same meaning and thus express the same proposition, could have different truth-values, e.g. "I am Spartacus" said by Spartacus and said by John Smith; and e.g. "It is Wednesday" said on a Wednesday and on a Thursday.

A number of philosophers and linguists claim that all definitions of a proposition are too vague to be useful. For them, it is just a misleading concept that should be removed from philosophy and semantics. W.V. Quine maintained that the indeterminacy of translation prevented any meaningful discussion of propositions, and that they should be discarded in favor of sentences. Strawson advocated the use of the term "statement".